by Lori Yates, Foxes Love Lemons
Big news – my town finally has a butcher shop! This was all kinds of exciting to me, because being able to call them up and order exactly the cut of meat I’d like is ever so much more exciting than relying on the local grocery store to just sell me whatever happens to be available. One of my very first special orders at the new butcher shop was five pounds of pork belly. That big ol’ hunk of beautiful meat was destined for these Pork Belly & Tomato Jam Sliders.
I placed my order and then anxiously awaited the pick-up date. Not even a little snowstorm could keep me from the butcher shop that morning. I brought the lovingly-wrapped pork belly home and roasted it low and slow for hours, until it was super tender and just begging to be sliced up for sandwiches.
Recipe: Pork Belly & Tomato Jam Sliders
While the pork belly was roasting away in the oven, I used my stovetop space to whip up a tomato jam using Village Farms heavenly villagio marzano® tomatoes. These juicy bite-sized tomatoes have an incredibly sweet flavor, making them ideal for jamming (that’s the correct verb for “the act of making jam,” right? Let’s go with it). The jam is as simple as combining a few pounds of tomatoes with some brown sugar, sherry vinegar, ginger, cumin, allspice and red pepper flakes, and then letting it simmer for an hour or so until it . . . looks like jam.
The irony of this story is, of course, that the sweet and savory, intensely tomato-flavored jam was so heavenly that IT ended up being the star of the show. Heck, that tomato jam could make a piece of cardboard taste as decadent as pork belly. So, after years and years of waiting for a butcher shop, it turns out that a few bags of tomatoes were the star of the day. Life’s funny like that, isn’t it?
P.S. If you have any leftover jam, dunk a grilled cheese sandwich into it. Trust me.
This post originally appeared on Foxes Love Lemons.
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